The Frankie Boyle libel case – an example of how race has replaced sex as the No1 taboo

So you can call Frankie Boyle many things, but you can’t call him a racist. The sweary comic won £54,650 in damages after a High Court jury found that the Daily Mirror had libeled him by calling him a “racist comedian”.

It’s understandable that he chose to sue, racism being the worst stain on anyone’s character today. The term “racist comedian” in particular evokes images of 1970s comedy where the humour was genuinely nasty, the aim being to demean and humiliate minorities.

Boyle’s jokes weren’t like that at all. For instance, he used the word “Paki” in a sketch about Afghanistan, but although some people might laugh at the forbidden word, the joke was about the different value the British media places on the lives of Britons and Afghans. Boyle is someone who makes the occasional joke about race, not a racist comedian.

The problem is with definition. There’s a rule that once a society becomes obsessed with a particular sin, its definition grows ever broader to catch more sinners (as in the recent redefinition of misogyny). No witch-finder ever concluded that society’s “witch problem” was over.

Racism originally meant a belief in racial supremacy and racial hatred, but has broadened to include “belief in racial difference” and also “prejudice, dislike or discrimination”.

The problem is that applying such a definition makes almost every single human being on earth a racist, even the purest of heart, as neuroscience increasingly tells us. (An interesting test would be to apply stress-measuring devices to people and have them walk around different neighbourhoods. The results would be the same, I would guess. I would also be curious to find out if whether, just as homophobes are sometimes turned on by man-on-man action, the most vocal anti-racists perhaps feel more threatened in ethnically different areas.)

The current definition of racism describes an aspect of our humanity, which is why it has proved so difficult to eradicate. These feelings are also spectral, so categorising people as either "racist" or "non-racist" is inexact. You can make pathological racism unacceptable and uncommon by stigmatising it, just as you can make pathological greed and lust unacceptable, but you can’t change human nature.

Lust and sex were to the 1950s what racism and race are to our society, which is why British comedy was obsessed with sexual innuendo, things we thought about but were unable to express. As polite society has become more race-conscious therefore comedians are inclined to joke about race precisely because it is so uncomfortable and therefore funny. David Brent’s awkward confusion of his Asian staff and his cack-handed small talk with a black colleague reflect some white people’s difficulty in talking to people of other races. We laughed at his colleague Gareth who refers to “coloureds”, not because he’s bad, but because he’s gauche about the correct terminology and so unwittingly breaks a social code.

And the moral code of racial politics, which forbids discussing difference, invites comedy, just as strict rules about sex provoke humour. People have always laughed about ethnic differences, and it’s probably quite healthy; the Jewish joke, told by Jews, was an early example of this.

Modern comedy about race isn’t about making fun of other people – genuine nastiness isn’t normally funny – but about laughing at humanity and our imperfections. The sort of racial utopia that the 1960s promised has not come, and probably never will, and it’s better to laugh at all our awkwardness and differences than pretend that they don’t exist. Comedy is, after all, about poking fun at delusions, not enforcing them.